2/09/2010

We made it to the "Sunshine State"!

safe and sound with only a few mistakes -

When I travel, I wear a cross necklace; no question. There is also at least one in my bag. If I have to pack 'light', I only take a black and brown but if I have plenty of room I take many. Sunday evening I packed many but chose my St. John petroglyph. Don't ask me why but that was my first mistake. Read on....

After 2 days of snow, 25 hours of snow removal and fixing one flat tire, we were Florida bound! We left Sunday evening around 6:30 and I was immediately wondering if we did the right thing. This is what the first road we travelled on looked like - mistake #2 (keep in mind that it's not only the motor home but we also tow a vehicle). It is about 10 miles for us to get to I-81 which we were very surprised to see was only one lane and that was even ice packed. From I-81 we hit I-66 which wasn't much better and quickly started to deteriorate since some thawing occurred during the day but the temperature was steadily dropping and was expected to go down as low as single digits. With about 10 miles left to go before we hit the beltway, we gave up. It was just too treacherous to keep going. My sister on the other hand was ahead of us and decided to keep moving....

We stopped in Manassas which is only about 1 1/5 hours from us for the night. Olive Garden was an excellent choice :) then we headed to Walmart for our stay. (most super-centers allow motorhomes to stay overnight which is great) We decided to get a picture of one of the piles of snow....(a little dirty but you get the point) these piles were everywhere!The bread shelves were still bare from the 'blizzard'But there was plenty of milk...We decided to get an early start and found the roads somewhat better by 8:30 a.m. but still ran into this. It honestly felt like a concrete truck just dropped gobs of concrete.....very rough!By the time we hit Quantico in Virginia the roads were alot better and then North Carolina was great - dry roads, no snow and sunshine! We were excited, to say the least. I spotted my first palm tree in NC....love it!

We kept going throughout the day and finally made it here by around 10:00 last night - safe and sound.

The weather is nice, a little chilly but nothing like back home. The forecast calls for 10+ inches of snow starting today through tomorrow. I hate it for the other 1/2 of our family :( but they will survive and volunteered to fill in for Ronnie and Dad with the snow removal. When will all this 'snow' stop!!??